Rising Hegemon
The trail of the Abramoff investigation led several times directly into the White House, but Bush Administration Justice Department investigators, headed by Public Integrity head, Noel Hillman, consistently refused to follow any leads. Hillman was rewarded for keeping things on the right track. He’s now a federal judge.
One likely trail led straight to Alabama and the current controversy surrounding the politically motivated prosecution of former Governor Don E. Siegelman. Abramoff and his sidekick Michael Scanlon, a former assistant to current governor Bob Riley, were deeply involved in advising and representing gambling interests in the Southeast. They turned their clients to support Riley in his campaign against Siegelman, and are linked to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars which flowed into the Riley campaign coffers. It seems likely that Rove knew of or perhaps even had some marginal involvement in these funding and campaign efforts, which sit firmly in the background of the efforts to remove Siegelman from the political process through a corrupt prosecution.
One of Aristotle’s key tests in the definition of forms of government is recited in the Politics: What do you call a state whose ruler, in his conduct of the affairs of state, is enshrouded in secrecy, particularly when the facts, if disclosed, would alert the people to his lawlessness or criminality, but conversely, the same ruler spies constantly upon his people giving them no repose in the conduct of their own personal affairs? Such a ruler, says Aristotle, is called a tyrant, and the quality of his rule is called tyranny. So let’s be clear what the Bush Justice Department is busily constructing. The standards for a democracy are something altogether different.
It is going to take Servicemaster a long time before it gets out the mess of this stench when Bush and Cheney are gone.
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